As most of our group can only play during the weekends, we found a server that wipes twice a week (Thursdays and Mondays) and has a gather rate of 5x with some other quite fun mods that starts some modded server events. For us, this server is perfect to play on :-)

For others, when you think Rust feels like a fulltime job, try playing on some modded servers to your liking!

I have the same issues, even as a paid user, using auto builds seems extremly (annoyingly) slow. Building it locally or using a CI service (CircleCI, without cache) is much faster and builds in a few minutes instead of 1 to 3 hours.